Supercross 2017: Oakland -- Predictions Review
2/7/2017
How did the "This Week" predictions do for Supercross week 5 at Oakland? Things settled back in a bit at Oakland, with the one potential surprise being Eli Tomac blowing away Ryan Dungey again -- depending on if you expected a repeat performance from Phoenix or not.
There were a few anomalies -- Marvin Musquin having a mid-race injury that slowed him down (if you look at the Lap Chart from the recap he was riding in 4th then 5th before the problem), Josh Grant getting injured (apparently by a concrete block), and Justin Bogle going down for a DNF -- but other than that most riders were within 1 or 2 spots. No exact matches, unfortunately, but 9 riders were within 1 spot and 3 more were within 2 spots.
My bar of success for the This Week predictions is getting over half of the riders within 2 spots -- for Oakland it had 12 of 20 (and 12 of 19 if you excuse Grant's fluke crash/injury). If you relax the standards to within 3 spots, then it's 15 out of 20, or 75% of the riders predicted within 3 spots. While the most important prediction (1st Place) was off by 1 spot (Tomac was predicted 2nd), the rest of the field's projections were pretty well in line with what actually went down.
Stadium/Track Adjustments
Since the Stadium/Track Adjustment is still a bit of a work in progress (The MX Book goes through it in detail, with encouraging conclusions), I highlight the major ones each week to see if the riders' finishing spots were better or worse at the Supercross stadium -- that is, were the results in line with the predicted adjustment or not?
There was 1 major Stadium/Track Adjustment and a few moderate ones for the 450's. I will list the 3 biggest to compare how the adjustment compared with the apparent effect of the stadium:
They are all in the correct direction and also around the same magnitude, which is simlar to last week and good news that the Track Adjustment is showing predictive value (even in Supercross, where the track layouts are not entirely consistent at any given venue from year to year).
The largest Track Adjustment, for Jake Weimer, expected him to do 3.3 points better at O.Co Coliseum than at the average track. Before the adjustment, he was predicted to earn 4 points (7.3 points after the adjustment), and he earned 8 -- a difference of 4 points. That's +3.3 (predicted effect) vs +4 (actual effect), so the adjustment was very close to correct for him.
Each of Justin Brayton and Chad Reed were predicted to do better at O.Co Coliseum than at the average track. Brayton was expected to do 1 point better and earned 2 more than predicted; Reed was expected to do 0.8 points better and earned 1 more than predicted.
Next week, will moving East to Texas cause a reshuffling of the order for the riders? Will the open layout of AT&T Stadium favor Eli Tomac's outdoor style? We'll see what the predictions say on Thursday (or Friday at the latest).
Posted by: SagehenMacGyver47 ::: As always – Feedback welcomed
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